For Ku Yao-ming (
Ku's house in Tungshih was designated half-collapsed after the devastating earthquake that measured 7.3 on the Richter scale. The quake also led to a shutdown of Ku's restaurant business and caused Ku to join many others in the ranks of the unemployed after the disaster.
PHOTO: CHIU YU-TZU, TAIPEI TIMES
"Construction done with ecological engineering methods to treat collapsed land in mountainous areas dragged me out of a 20-month period during which I had no income," Ku told the Taipei Times.
PHOTO: CHIU YU-TZU, TAIPEI TIMES
In June, 2001, Ku became one of the squad chiefs supervising tasks done by diligent workers, who were mostly mechanics, technicians and farmers before the 921 earthquake.
Job opportunities
To restore several collapsed areas along the highway passing through the Central Mountain range, the township offices of Tungshih and Hoping were entrusted by the central government to hire local victims of the earthquake to do the work. As of the end of last year, 26 construction projects offering 56,000 job opportunities with NT$1,800 daily pay, were completed.
According to Liu Ching-te (劉慶得), the secretary of the Tungshih township office, these construction projects are welcomed by local residents.
"Most unemployed people would rather do hard physical work than to sit at home and face an uncertain future," Liu said.
At many construction sites along the highway, Ku and thousands of workers used cobbles, which are densely packed in gabions, to build firm and solid embankments. On steep slopes where mechanical cranes cannot reach, workers passed stones from hand to hand building facilities to channel rain water effectively.
Working at remote construction sites at altitudes of more than 1,400m, workers have to make fires to keep themselves warm during lunch breaks. On each working day, they drink spring water from the top of the mountain and use it to wash dust from their faces before returning home after eight hours of hard physical work.
Their performance was tested by sudden torrential rains during the summer last year. Despite the 260mm rainfall in Kukuan in one day at the end of June last year, newly completed facilities and recently planted vegetation jointly preserve the once-fragile slopes. The result inspired hundreds of workers.
Ku and his partners are now working on the restoration work using ecological engineering methods on a 500m-long slope, which sits in a section of the highway between Kukuan and Techi.
Covered with giant rocks and dried trunks, the slope was once, in fact, the road, until it was devastated by mudflows and landslides triggered by heavy rains brought by Typhoon Toraji(桃芝) in the summer of 2001. Before the earthquake, the place was an important research site for scientists at Agricultural Research Institute to study trout living in Maling River.
Search
Ku and his teammates spent 25 days some months ago searching for deep slits in the topsoil at the top of the slope where rainwater might accumulate and eventually trigger more landslides. During their search they joyfully discovered an unexposed rare giant Taiwan incense cedar, which needed four people to circle it.
The slits they found, with a total length of about 300m, are fixed by being filled with soil and gravel, collected by workers on the slope.
To further preserve the slope, workers also spread seeds of species such as the Taiwan incense cedar and Zelkova Formosan trees, hoping the trees' root systems will eventually bind the fragile slope soil together.
"Without spending time working here, many of us would never have a chance to experience the fragility of the environment," Ku said, pointing at several flourishing seedlings.
Public Construction Commission Vice Chairman Kuo Ching-chiang (
"Unquestionably, constructions adopting ecological engineering methods have successfully turned some indifferent residents into into real appreciators of their local environment," Kuo said.
construction
At another construction site in Hoping township, through which runs the Wushihkeng river, a tributary of the Taan River, Kuo examined the newly grown vegetation on the top of a steep 350m-long slope composed of loose gravel layers, which collapsed during the 921 earthquake.
Fifty-seven-year-old worker Teng Chiu-chien (鄧秋乾) told Kuo that the completion of placing posts and establishing railings, work that he said needed the skills of Spiderman to do, was one of the greatest experiences of his life as he witnessed the way nature made a gradual recovery from the ruin of a natural disaster.
"I also saw the challenging task as a way of curing myself," Teng said.
Teng's house in Tungshih became one of 5,000 half-collapsed buildings left by the quake. More than 16,000 houses in Tungshih were left either fully collapsed or half-collapsed after the 1999 temblor.
Teng's co-worker, Chang Wen-hsi (張文禧), lost his house in Tungshih during the earthquake. After losing money in his orchard business for three years Chang became one of the spidermen mending slits at the top of the slope and building water channels.
Chang and Teng are just two of thousands of Hakka people working in the tough conditions in the mountain areas alongside Aboriginal workers, from whom they learned rock-climbing skills. Through their work, they stepped out of the shadow of the 921 earthquake together.
Nowadays, Teng, Chang and others come back to the mountain range often to check the results of their work.
Kuo said he was glad to see the harmonious interaction between people from different places and with diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Between June of 2001 and June of last year, construction focusing on the treatment of a 115-hectare area of collapsed land in the catchment area of Wushihkeng River offered 10,288 job opportunities to local people suffering from the 921 earthquake.
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